1. Field of the Invention
The invention is in the area of dynamic information storage or retrieval, specifically retrieving data from rotating media such as an optical disk, including physical information about the media itself, and storing that data and physical information in image files.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various methods of reading data from rotating media, and representing the location of the data on the media, have been disclosed in the prior art. Various methods of making an image file of the data content of the rotating media have also been disclosed. However, conventional technologies for making an image file, encountered in many applications, concern only the media content and not the physical parameters of the media. These applications store only the general logical layout (Table of contents, TOC) of the media and the data itself. Such an approach has only limited usage and does not allow a user to backup special types of media with complex physical parameters (e.g., protected media).
U.S. Pat. No. 6,693,869 to Ballantyne discloses a program that locates files on optical media disks, and computes an image file that defines where data will be located on the optical disk. But the method of locating the files on the disk does not involve measuring the radial angle of each data sector along the spiral track.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,708,632 and 5,914,916, both to Totsuka, disclose measuring the angle along the spiral track, and discuss that the distance between data sectors can be represented by an angle measured in radians. However, these patents do not disclose representing each data sector's location along the spiral track with a radial angle measurement from a given reference point, and then using that radial angle information as part of an image file.
In addition, U.S. Pat. No. 6,349,077 to Smelt; U.S. Pat. No. 6,680,884 to Niessen; U.S. Pat. No. 5,247,498 to Takekoshi; U.S. Pat. No. 5,247,499 to Hayashi; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,804,176 to Komazaki disclose apparatuses and methods for scanning an optical disk and accessing the data it contains, using various navigation parameters, seek algorithms, track searches, etc. But none of these patents disclose the angle navigation parameter of the invention, wherein each data sector's location along the rotating media's spiral track is represented by a radial angle measurement.
No prior art patents show the method of the instant invention—that is, storing physical information about rotating media data in an image file by determining the angular position of each data sector on the media's spiral track and storing this information as part of the image file. No prior art image format stores this physical information in an image file, and indeed, the particular topology measurement used in the invention—representing each data sector's location along the spiral track with a radial angle measurement from a given reference point—does not exist in the prior art.